Daviess County officials are shuff ling money to keep a successful anti-recidivism program in operation.
The Integrated Reentry and Correctional Support (IRACS) program has been operating for a short time out of the Daviess County jail, but local officials say it is working.
“We have learned that just locking people up and then letting them out just doesn’t work very well because they get rearrested,” said President of the Daviess County Commissioners Nathan Gabhart. “We are trying to give these folks the skill sets they need to be functioning members of society. So far, the ROI is there in terms of recidivism.”
“IRACs is a program that helps people integrate from the security center back into society. It has worked very well,” said Daviess Superior Court Judge Dan Murrie. “When I was prosecutor, I was against this 100 percent. I thought it was like a liberal mindset and it turns out it is not. It is a personcentered approach to getting people ready to come back into the community. The catch is that it is funded by the state through a number of grants. They are now requiring a county match of 20% or $100,000. That is a new addition since July.”
Murrie says the county only had a short time to come up with that money and he is suggesting using money from the opioid settlement to fill in the needed money.
“Many other counties have used some of their opioid money to cover that grant, so I am asking to use some of that money for the same purpose,” said Murrie. “My ask would exhaust that fund for the year. This is a shortterm fix. I am willing to get creative to find longer term funding. I don’t want to put on a ton of evidence or anything, but when you talk about return on investment what this group has saved us in real money is probably three or four times the ask here.”
“The opioid money is money that just fell in our lap and is easy to access right now. I want to make sure we have a long-term solution,” said Gabhart. “Now, the county has to be participating some more in the funding so now we are going to work together to try and figure out that future funding. We figure the cost for the county will continue to grow. We want to put together some common sense funding. In my mind, we need to find where we are saving the money and then get the money there.”
Murrie says he is willing to be creative in finding the money to keep the IRACs program afloat in the future and he feels that since the opioid settlement money will only be around for a short time, the county needs to find a longterm funding fix.
“We just needed to get some time. I feel with time we can come up with better solutions. We didn’t have the time to kick the tires on other options,” said Murrie. “What we had to do was look at what other counties did. That is one of my least favorite ways to do things because I don’t think other counties run as well as we do.”
There is no word on when a solution will be found, but officials will need to work quickly to get the county council on board to appropriate the funding.
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